ound you out? In
this temptation to mutual indulgence lies the particular peril to
morality in married life. Daily they drop a little lower from the first
ideal, and for a while continue to accept these changelings with a gross
complacency. At last Love awakes and looks about him; find his hero sunk
into a stout old brute, intent on brandy pawnee; finds his heroine
divested of her angel brightness; and, in the flash of that first
disenchantment, flees for ever.

Again, the husband, in these unions, is usually a man, and the wife
commonly enough a woman; and when this is the case, although it makes
the firmer marriage, a thick additional veil of misconception hangs
above the doubtful business. Women, I believe, are somewhat rarer than
men; but then, if I were a woman, myself, I daresay I should hold the
reverse; and at least we all enter more or less wholly into one or other
of these camps. A man who delights women by his feminine perceptions
will often scatter his admirers by a chance explosion of the under side
of man; and the most masculine and direct of women will some day, to
your dire surprise, draw out like a telescope into successive lengths of
personation. Alas! for the man knowing her to be at heart more candid
than himself, who shall flounder, panting, through these mazes in the
quest for truth. The proper qualities of each sex are, indeed, eternally
surprising to the other. Between the Latin and the Teuton races there
are similar divergencies, not to be bridged by the most liberal
sympathy. And in the good, plain, cut-and-dry explanations of this life,
which pass current among us as the wisdom of the elders, this difficulty
has been turned with the aid of pious lies. Thus, when a young lady has
angelic features, eats nothing to speak of, plays all day long on the
piano, and sings ravishingly in church, it requires a rough infidelity
falsely called cynicism, to believe that she may be a little devil after
all. Yet so it is: she may be a talebearer, a liar, and a thief; she may
have a taste for brandy, and no heart. My compliments to George Eliot
for her Rosamond Vincy; the ugly work of satire she has transmuted to
the ends of art, by the companion figure of Lydgate; and the satire was
much wanted for the education of young men. That doctrine of the
excellence of women, however chivalrous, is cowardly as well as false.
It is better to face the fact, and know, when you marry that you take
into your life a creatu